The present invention relates to the machining of engineering components having complex curved shapes and particularly to the machining of components having multiple complex curved surfaces in a single engineering component such as the root section of turbine blades.
When a root section of a turbine blade is produced by machining, the machining can be in several procedures, each requiring a separate machining operation with separate set-up requirements. These procedures can include cutting of the material stock to rough required shape, milling to required dimensions of the required stock dimensions, de-burring, grinding, machining again to required dimension; roughing the root section of the turbine blade by milling, rough and finish milling of the hook curvature of the root section, a final taper machining and hand grinding with sides milling to obtain the finished root section of a turbine blade. The finished root section of the turbine blade itself often has to satisfy allowable tolerances pertaining to that particular dimension, thickness, shape and curvature.
Presently, the method of preparing these root sections of a turbine blade with the many successive machining operations requires separate tolerance measurements, separate machining operations and multiple set-ups. The instant invention has been devised with the view to substantially eliminating the many separate procedures inherent in the prior art of machining root sections of turbine blades and has as its essential object an improved method for machining the root section of turbine blades on a vertical or horizontal machining center with rotary table.
In the machining of certain metal objects, such as turbine blades, machine gears with multi-faceted contours, multiple surfaces can be required to properly meet design requirements such as concave and convex surfaces, which meet and co-exist upon the same planar surface. In the process of manufacturing such metal objects with continuous planar surfaces, co-existent concave and convex surfaces are typically prepared by milling a metal block with a milling machine to prepare the required planar curved surfaces with high accuracy.
The instant invention comprises a process for contour control machining of metal blocks by providing a control procedure for standard computer numerical control conventional milling machines to machine convex and concave curvature on a vertical machining center with rotary table or horizontal machining center with integrated rotary table.
The instant invented process reduces the number of separate procedures required in a conventional machining procedure using a conventional milling machine by permitting all metal cutting and machining steps to be done on a vertical or horizontal machining center. All cutting, grinding and machining is performed on one milling machine in contrast to the use of more than one cutting machining, grinding, and milling machine required in a conventional process.